Detroit Review: Kathryn Bigelow’s Harrowing Drama Has an Uneasy Power

On the night of July 25, 1967, three young black men were shot and killed in the annex building of Detroit’s Algiers Motel during a police investigation. A riot—sparked by the raid of an after-hours black nightclub by a largely white police force—was gripping the city, and in the hazy aftermath of the Algiers incident, details of what happened were hard to confirm. Accounts from those inside the hotel—both police (initially) and motel guests—suggested a horrifying act of police brutality, one that director Kathryn Bigelow and her Zero Dark Thirty screenwriter Mark Boal depict in the harrowing new film Detroit (opening August 4). It’s an effective, agonizingly hard-to-watch docudrama, one that benefits from Bigelow’s skill for telling complex stories with propulsive clarity.

Of course, whether a white director and a white writer are the people who should be telling this story at all is a matter of debate, especially at a time when the struggle for representation on- and off-screen has become one of the film industry’s most pressing issues. (Nominally, anyway. Lip service has certainly been paid, but tangible results are, as ever, slow to come.) Adding to that is the reality that Bigelow and Boal’s reputations as fact-based storytellers were tarnished by the controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thirty’s depiction of the efficacy of torture. So Detroit comes laden with a set of built-in problems—perhaps even red flags. But nonetheless, Detroit is such a gripping and ultimately shattering piece of cinema that it merits seeing—albeit with a skeptical eye.

The opening stretches of the film set up what looks to be a broader survey of the riots. A smoky, convivial juke joint is disrupted by bullying cops. The club’s patrons, including returning Vietnam veterans, are hauled off in paddywagons, inciting a small skirmish that swiftly blooms into something much larger. Chaos descends, the National Guard is called in, and the city braces itself. At this point, it looks as though we’re in store for a sociological, ensemble panorama of a volatile period in recent American history. And in some senses, we are—just on a much more intimately terrifying scale that it first seems. As it goes, Detroit hones its focus, ominously detailing the precipitating events that led to the bloodshed at the Algiers. Bigelow keenly establishes her spaces, carefully tracking where each character is at any given moment, the film humming with tense, palpable presence as it descends inexorably into the darkness.

Though the cast of characters—most based on real people—is large, we’re particularly drawn to a few key players. There’s Larry (sensitive, expressive Algee Smith), an aspiring Motown star whose group, The Dramatics, is about to play an important concert before outside events interfere. There’s Melvin, a dutiful, yes-sir, keep-your-head down security guard played with intelligence and, especially in later scenes, breathtaking empathy by John Boyega, as Melvin realizes that his politeness, his careful following of the rules set before him, will not help him in the end. The way the film considers various codes of black behavior in response to an insistent white threat will spark some debate, I'm sure.

As we perhaps must be, we are also introduced to the police officers involved in this nightmare. Will Poulter, a British actor whose Seussian face can exude both whimsy and menace, fully embraces the latter quality as the film’s chief antagonist, Krauss, a ruthless power-tripping beat cop whose flares of racist anger occasionally give way—tellingly, unnervingly—to his perverse approximation of decency. As events at the Algiers escalate, Detroit divests itself of historical drama trappings and becomes an unflinching home-invasion horror movie. Scenes of abuse and, yes, torture stretch on and on, a fatal charge pulsating in the air. It’s excruciating viewing. Bigelow does not let you avert your eyes, as this tightly built stretch of film leaves little room for an out. Which is punishing, yes. But it crucially lays the groundwork for the sorrowfully moving third act of the film, which details the legal and emotional fallout of this bloody, infuriating incident.

It’s in this final third when Bigelow most surprises us—or most surprised me, anyway. She sets her chilly, technical mien aside and lets the truly human side of this awful story rise to the surface, showing how police brutality is not just an immediate trauma, experienced and then forgotten. It does, of course, have lasting reverberations—societally and personally—that can echo and haunt and rile for decades, for the rest of a city’s and a person’s life. Detroit finds a graceful way to illustrate that, in moments when Algee Smith’s performance takes on a quietly keening enormity. (He’s a beautiful singer, too.)

In some ways, I wish we had that film instead: the deeply felt, graciously observed drama about what effect a night of violence and annihilation can have on a person who, in his survival, is still forced to live in a world whose systems loom in opposition to his very existence. But that is not the kind of film Bigelow tends to make. So we have this procedural gut-punch instead, a perhaps necessary reenactment of what may have happened—a title card at the end of the film is careful to point out that its version of events is not undisputed fact—in all its grisly dimensions. It’s not a pleasant nor remotely comforting night at the movies, but pleasant and comforting is likely not the kind of narrative we need right now, at least when it comes to matters of race and the police state in America.

Which might bring us back to whether Bigelow and Boal are the right stewards for this story. The truth of the matter is, I don’t know. I left Detroit shaken, moved, angry. It’s a striking film, with a significant, wounding impact. But its larger cultural value will have to be assessed by many more people than me. I suspect there will be those who appreciate Detroit’s unblinking approach to violence, its frank and unadorned depictions of racism at its most plainly and physically stated. On the other hand, an argument could be made that these scenes of torture are not without a kind of prurience—white filmmakers staging the violation of black bodies as set-piece thriller and then, only later, framing them as political outrage. To me, Detroit lies somewhere between those two assessments, in a place lost to soothing answers or sturdy prescriptions. Which is a comfortable enough place for a film to be. Not so much for real people.